‘The state tolerated this situation, for it enabled it to recruit the army and raise taxes directly from the peasantry, without intermediaries.’

‘And conscription was only used to recruit the militia, a reserve army never now mobilized except in wartime.’

‘For now he's working behind the scenes, trying to build up a $250,000 war chest and recruit an army of campaigners.’

‘The first conscript armies were recruited in France to fight the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.’

‘Now we are recruiting an army for direct action.’

‘He is planning to forge even closer links with the public to help achieve this, recruiting an army of volunteers to supplement the work already being done by officers, special constables and community support officers.’

‘And the Government has frittered away a huge fortune by recruiting a vast army of non-productive civil servants.’

‘When the pope added debt relief for the families of those who fought, he had no trouble recruiting an army.’

‘A company is recruiting an army of retired plumbers in a new approach to tackling the skills shortage.’

‘He started recruiting his army and sent an estimated 4,000 men to Afghanistan for training.’

‘The Bengal army was recruited not from Bengal itself but from northern India, especially from Awadh.’

‘Meanwhile airport bosses have recruited an army of private security workers to prevent the airport from grinding to a halt.’

‘To counter the offensive the British authorities began to recruit a special force for deployment in Ireland.’

‘Instead, he recruited a force of his own, consisting of out-of-uniform black officers from cities up and down the East Coast.’

‘As early as 1889, the Chamber of Mines recruited a labor force of black workers.’

‘Is he planning on recruiting an army or something?’

‘A new force was recruited, trained and dispatched by mid-August.’

‘The industrial labour force was recruited from a number of sources.’

‘The new paramilitary forces will be recruited from two sources: tribes and former army members.’

Origin

Mid 17th century (in the senses ‘fresh body of troops’ and ‘supplement the numbers in a group’): from obsolete French dialect recrute, based on Latin recrescere ‘grow again’, from re- ‘again’ + crescere ‘grow’.